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Theorists in organizational behavior have generally ignored emotional determinants of behavior. A task of this dissertation was to extend the use of emotions for understanding organizational behavior in general and work motivation in particular. Two theories, expectancy theory and network theory, are used to make predictions about the relationship between mood and perceptions of the relationship between effort and performance. According to expectancy theory, the effort that people choose to expend at tasks is a function of their belief about the degree to which effort and performance covary. Network theory predicts that memories are connected by a network of associations. The accessibility for recall of a memory is a function of the activation of these associations. In this way positive events are more accessible for recall when individuals are in a positive mood state because of associations based on the affective valence of memories. Such accessibility of events for recall has been shown to be a determinant of probability judgements. On this basis it was predicted that mood would bias individuals' judgements of the probability that specific levels of effort lead to specific levels of performance. In other words, that mood affects expectancy. Specifically, it was predicted that individuals in an elated mood would report higher expectancy than individuals in a depressed mood. Mood was defined as a self-evaluative feeling state. Two other hypotheses were formed: that mood would influence how cause for behavior is attributed, and that individual differences in self esteem would moderate the relationship between mood and expectancy. Three studies were performed to provide a foundation for the testing of these hypotheses. In a fourth study they were tested. Study One assessed the psychometric properties of measures of mood states, individual differences, and task perceptions. Study Two concerned the experimental induction of mood. Mood manipulations used in the experimental literature were reviewed and one, a musical procedure, was chosen. The validity of this manipulation was then tested by having participants listen to the music of an elated, neutral, or depressed mood induction procedure. The results of Study Two provided strong evidence for the validity of the manipulation. Both self-report measures of mood and an unobtrusive behavioral measure were significantly affected. The results of Study Two also showed the utility of a conceptualization of mood as comprising two components: arousal and pleasure. It was shown that depression is characterized by low arousal and displeasure, and elation by high arousal and pleasure. Study Three reviewed the conceptualization and measurement of expectancy. It was argued that expectancy is properly conceptualized as the perceived covariation between effort and performance. This requires measurement of the relationship between multiple levels of effort and multiple levels of performance and calculation from these measures of an index of perceived effort -- performance covariation. Most prior measurement has only considered the relationship between high effort and high performance. Further, it was argued that such appropriate measurement allows predictions to be made about expectancy across individuals, in contrast to the argument that expectancy theory is a within-subjects theory. Previous authors have used such an approach to measure expectancy but have not demonstrated its validity. Study Three undertook such validation. Participants completed one of two experimental tasks: one with high objective expectancy, the other with low objective expectancy. As predicted, scores on the perceived covariation measure of expectancy were significantly higher in the high objective expectancy task. Measures of related constructs were influenced in a manner consistent with this finding. It was concluded that strong support for the expectancy measure existed. On the foundation of Studies One, Two, and Three, Study Four undertook to test the formal hypotheses of the dissertation. In each of three experimental sessions, participants completed a business decision-making task, underwent either an elation, neutral mood, or depression induction procedure, and then completed measures of their mood state, expectancy, and other task perceptions. The results of Study Four indicated that significant differences in mood resulted from the manipulation. However, none of the experimental hypotheses were supported. Mood did not influence expectancy or task attributions. A number of alternate explanations for this finding were considered, including failure of the mood manipulation, measurement error, and lack of statistical power. Of these, it was concluded that while Study Four lacked power to detect a large effect, this did not fully explain the failure to support the experimental hypotheses. Also compelling was the argument that the mood manipulation was not sufficiently powerful. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

Orientador: Alfredo Pereira Júnior / Banca: Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez / Banca: Antonio Florentino Neto / Resumo: Pesquisas sobre meditação em muitos campos de investigação cresceram amplamente no Ocidente no último século, principalmente por causa de seus benefícios. No entanto, não há um conceito bem definido do que é meditação. Há uma diversidade de técnicas e tradições de culturas diferentes que a cultivam, de tal forma que podemos encontrá-la em todos os continentes. No campo científico, a maioria dos pesquisadores procura pelas relações da meditação e atividades cerebrais, contribuindo para investigações sobre a consciência e para filosofia da mente, e ajudando a abordar debates não resolvidos sobre percepção, atenção e processos de aprendizagem. Neste trabalho enfrentamos o desafio de abordar filosoficamente a meditação, considerando a variedade de abordagens disponíveis e a diversidade de achados empíricos. Revisamos teorias e interpretações sobre a natureza da mente, e abordamos a hipótese de Walach (2014) que a meditação seria uma capacidade epistêmica da consciência que acessa uma realidade objetiva. Partindo do Monismo de Triplo Aspecto de proposto por Pereira Jr. (2013, 2015) assumimos que a marca da consciência é o sentimento, e resgatamos os antigos argumentos budistas de Nagarjuna sobre o sofrimento para conceber a meditação como uma experiência que é sobre o sentimento. Sugerimos também ao final da dissertação que a intuição pode ser vista como uma maneira de conhecer o mundo por meio de práticas de meditação. / Abstract: Research on meditation in many fields of investigation has been widely growing in the Occident in the last century, mainly because of its benefits. However, there isn't a well-defined concept of what is meditation and there is a vast quantity of technics and traditions from different cultures that cultivate it, in a way that we can find it in every continent. On the scientific field, most of the researchers are looking for the relations of meditation and brain activities, contributing to investigations on consciousness and to the philosophy of the mind, helping to approach unsolved debates about perception, attention, and learning processes. In this work we present the challenge of working with meditation, considering the many approaches available and the diversity of empirical findings. We review theories and interpretations about the nature of the mind and address a hypothesis by Walach (2014) that meditation would be an epistemic capacity of the consciousness that accesses an objective reality. Starting up from Monism of Triple Aspect proposed by Pereira Jr. (2013, 2015) we assume that the mark of consciousness is feeling, and rescue the ancient Buddhist arguments of Nagarjuna about suffering to conceive meditation as an experience that is about feeling. We also suggest by the end of the dissertation that intuition can be regarded as a way of knowing about the world by means of meditation practices. / Mestre

While previous literature successfully demonstrates that racial prejudice is nourished and augmented by conventional societal notions of morality, it rarely explicates the social psychological mechanisms underlying this process. We know a relationship exists between racial prejudice and morality, but we do not fully understand how society's moral codes become operational within the human mind, and thus, how intractable they might be. My dissertation bridges this gap by developing `apathetic racism theory', an interdisciplinary approach that combines neurological and sociological theories and methodologies, suggesting that moral apathy towards blacks constitutes the main mechanism for contemporary racism. The theory distinguishes between two forms of racism that rely on distinct neural processes: a) sympathetic gradationalism towards the middle class (for which the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is pivotal) and b) blended racism against the upper and lower classes (for which the amygdala and the insula are crucial). Using three experiments: 1) a pictorial vignette study, 2) a lesion study with patients with damage to the hypothesized brain regions, and 3) a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, this dissertation provides partial support to my theory. By shedding light on some of the unexplored emotional mechanisms of race bias, this dissertation elucidates how seemingly positive evaluations of members of racial out-groups might actually sustain a racially inequitable status-quo.

This study examines the effect of migration and emotions on knowledge transfer with the intention of identifying the emotions influencing the willingness of South African emigrants to transfer knowledge to South Africans living in South Africa. The increasing number of South Africans emigrating is exacerbating the skills shortage in the country and therefore it is of importance to understand the profile of a South African emigrant who is willing to transfer knowledge to South Africans living in South Africa. Through understanding who to target for assistance South Africa will be able to better utilise those emigrants who are willing to assist. The primary data was collected through an online survey. Of the 311 responses 210 were usable in the regression models run. The outcome of this research supports previous literature that positive knowledge sharing emotions play a major role in influencing the willingness to transfer knowledge. Because this is voluntary knowledge sharing emigrants tend to share knowledge when they are happy and when they feel positive towards knowledge sharing. This is influenced by positive feelings about their own knowledge and about their decision to emigrate. The results also suggest that emigrant‟s emotions towards knowledge sharing were not dominated by their feelings about South Africa, but rather by their emotions towards their host country. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

The dual nature of emotions as both bodily and cognitive phenomena has posed quite a conundrum for the cognitive sciences, as it does not square well with the long-held conviction that bodily phenomena are not cognitive and that cognitive phenomena do not take place in the body. This stark divide between the bodily and the cognitive has been called into question by so-called situated approaches to cognition that have taken over cognitive science in the last three decades. The framework of situated cognition claims to present a viable alternative to the classical cognitivist position in cognitive science, which regards cognitive processes as disembodied computations over symbolic representations. Instead, proponents of situated cognition aim at showing how cognitive processes crucially depend on an agent’s active engagements with the environment through her body, whereby bodily processes and interactions with the environment become parts of the cognitive process itself, thus lifting the barrier between body and cognition. This Ph.D.-Thesis explores how these recent developments in cognitive science may be applied to emotion theories, so that here too bodily and cognitive aspects of the phenomenon of emotion can be united. In this endeavor a particular focus will be laid on emotions’ intentionality, to explore how an embodied agent’s interactions with the environment impact how they are directed at the world and what emotions are about. After a cursory overview of the history of emotion theories and a brief introduction to situated cognition in section one, the articles in section two provide the necessary terminological and conceptual clarifications and render initial attempts to look into what it means for affective phenomena such as emotions to be situated. Section three draws the focus to the intentionality of emotions and demonstrates how a situated perspective provides a more adequate construal of emotions’ intentionality than the classical cognitivist conceptions. Finally, in section 4, the utility of situated affectivity is exemplified by showing how the embodiment and embeddedness of affective phenomena provides a deeper understanding of the structure of experiences in affective disorders such as depression.

Various researchers have noted that emotions expressed in dream reports are infrequent and, more often, unpleasant. These observations are ambiguous for several reasons: (1) Empirical opinions differ markedly with regard to the structure of mentation across the continuum of waking and sleeping experience. (2) While the waking state is usually assumed as an implicit baseline, few studies have quantitatively compared waking and dream emotions. (3) Dream researchers have not thought about the basic nature of emotions or certain constraints which sleep physiology might impose upon emotions. In light of these assertions and considerations, an intrasubject comparison of emotions in reports of waking experiences and dreams might seem worthwhile.

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Traditionally, attribution theory argues that strong external controls such as parental punishment undermine moral internalization. In contrast, this project argues that parental punishment does socialize morality, but it socializes moral prohibitions (rather than moral prescriptions) in particular. A strong focus on prohibitions, a proscriptive orientation, has unintended consequences. Study 1 found young adults' accounts of parental restrictiveness to predict their proscriptive orientation such that recalling the degree of how restrictive and punitive one's parents were activated a proscriptive dispositional sensitivity. Study 2 found that restrictive parenting was positively associated with shame. Further, for individuals with highly restrictive parents, temptations positively were related to shame. Due to the shame associated with temptations for individuals with restrictive parents, mental suppression was more difficult for them. After experimentally priming a proscriptive (versus prescriptive) orientations and inducing mental suppression of "immoral" thoughts, Study 3 found an interaction between proscriptive prime and parental restrictiveness such that the proscriptive prime caused the greatest amount of ego depletion, a loss of self-regulatory resources for those with restrictive parents. In the end, individuals who were most focused on prohibitions and had restrictive parents felt the most shame and had the lowest self-regulatory ability to resist their "immoral" temptations.

The central focus of this thesis is the dynamic interplay between light and shadow, with the intention of creating architectural spaces that evoke emotions. The research conducted in this thesis is rooted in the author's personal emotional experiences during the process of designing the space. The primary objective is to explore the impact of light on human emotions within spatial environments. Through these studies, the author endeavors to discover a common ground where light, shadow, architecture, and emotions intersect. Ultimately, the aim is to contribute valuable insights to the field of architecture, offering potential applications for the creation of more impactful and effective spatial environments. / Master of Architecture / Light, as a fundamental element of design, holds immense influence over individual's reactions to space and is indispensable for human existence. Human beings possess the ability to adapt and shape their environment according to their needs. It is crucial to comprehend the multifaceted nature of human beings, including their emotions and cognitive biases, at every stage of life. Through skillful manipulation of light, we can elicit authentic emotions and trigger physiological responses, establishing a deeper emotional connection between individuals and their surroundings. This thesis endeavors to explore the intricate interplay between human beings and their spatial environment, with a specific focus on lighting as the primary architectural element.